Romancing the pig

Free range pork settles into Squamish Valley

That'll Do Pig Free range pork can be hard to come by, though an Upper Squamish pig farmer has a few snorts on offer

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It’s the food intimacy thing again. To Fraser,
raising your dinner, even developing an affection for it, promotes respect.
While the tears clearly speak to that, the Frasers are careful not to go too
far. They don’t, for example, name their pigs, even though most people suggest
pigs are smart enough to learn their handles.

In any case, things were a little easier the
second time, when they sent 10 pigs to Langley, a slightly larger haul. Next
year, they hope to go larger still.

The free range business in Canada has long
been growing, so much so that, in 2000, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency
(CFIA)
began tightening
definitions in an effort to ensure free range products were actually free of
hormones. Before her experience with free range meat, Fraser was a vegetarian.

But not all herbivores can be won over, and
more than a few of them point suspicious fingers at the CFIA as a reason.
There’s the listeriosis outbreak, for example, or, more specifically, the fact
that some farmers are unable to guarantee that their feed is free of hormones
and pesticides.

But Fraser is confident about her practices.
Her farm is about as idyllic an image as the imagination can muster. Strafed by
steep cliffs with acreage rambling in and out of bushes, the whole set up is
pretty soothing. She and her husband are clearing more land in anticipation of
another bunch of pigs.

However, they don’t have any kind of
certification, a fact Fraser quickly explains. According to her research,
certifying bodies don’t always go far enough.

According to the Canadian Coalition for Farm
Animals (CCFA), there are almost 1.5 million sows reared in Canada, many of
them in crates of about two feet in width and seven feet in length. This, says
the CCFA, creates a host of problems, from animosity between animals to painful
pregnancies. To pre-empt violent conflict between pigs, producers will remove
their teeth and tails at birth.

While Fraser could have applied for
certification from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty Against Animals
(SPCA), she said their standards, which date back to 2001, don’t ban crating.
Further, space for pigs was recommended at eight to 10 square feet per animal
weighing up to 154 pounds.